Articulated Human Body Tracking Using Belief Propagation with Disparity Map

This paper suggests an efficient method which tracks articulated human body modeled with markov network using disparity map derived from stereo images. The conventional methods which only use color information to calculate likelihood for energy function tend to fail when background has same colors with objects or appearances of object are changed during the movement. In this paper, we present a method evaluating likelihood with both disparity information and color information to find human body parts. Since the human body part are cylinder projected to rectangles in 2D image plane, we use the properties of distribution of disparity of those rectangles that do not have discontinuous distribution. In addition to that we suggest a conditional-messages-update that is able to reduce unnecessary message update of belief propagation. Since the message update has comprised over 80% of the whole computation in belief propagation, the conditional-message-update yields 9~45% of improvements of computational time. Furthermore, we also propose an another speed up method called three dimensional dynamic models assumed the body motion is continuous. The experiment results show that the proposed method reduces the computational time as well as it increases tracking accuracy.